(Santa Barbara, Calif.) — On the second anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon oil platform blowout, a national panel of researchers is providing new insight into what happened in the disaster, as well as a guide for how to deal with such events in the future, and why existing tools were inadequate to predict what lay before them.
Tech
Athens, Ga. – On the second anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon blowout, a national panel of researchers including University of Georgia marine scientist Samantha Joye is urging the federal government to reassess how it would respond to similar oil spills that might occur in the future.
RICHLAND, Wash. – U.S. commercial building owners could save an average of 38 percent on their heating and cooling bills if they installed a handful of energy efficiency controls that make their heating, ventilation and air conditioning, also known as HVAC, systems more energy efficient, according to a recent report from the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. The estimated savings were based on computer modeling and simulation of building energy usage.
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — As biofuel production has increased – particularly ethanol derived from corn – a hotly contested competition for feedstock supplies has emerged between the agricultural grain markets and biofuel refineries. This competition has sparked concern for the more fundamental issue of allocating limited farmland resources, which has far-reaching implications for food security, energy security and environmental sustainability.
Anti-tobacco television advertising helps reduce adult smoking, according to a study by researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago's Institute for Health Research and Policy -- but some ads may be more effective than others.
Adults and youth are exposed to a variety of anti-smoking messages on television. However, no research had been done on whether the ads, produced by various sponsors, impact adult smoking behaviors, or on how the ads differ, says Sherry Emery, a senior scientist at the UIC institute and lead author of the study.
OAK RIDGE, Tenn., April 19, 2012 —The boundary between electronics and biology is blurring with the first detection by researchers at Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory of ferroelectric properties in an amino acid called glycine.
A multi-institutional research team led by Andrei Kholkin of the University of Aveiro, Portugal, used a combination of experiments and modeling to identify and explain the presence of ferroelectricity, a property where materials switch their polarization when an electric field is applied, in the simplest known amino acid—glycine.
WASHINGTON, April 19—To produce the maximum amount of energy, solar cells are designed to absorb as much light from the Sun as possible. Now researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, have suggested – and demonstrated – a counterintuitive concept: solar cells should be designed to be more like LEDs, able to emit light as well as absorb it. The Berkeley team will present its findings at the Conference on Lasers and Electro Optics (CLEO: 2012), to be held May 6-11 in San Jose, Calif.
As the two-year anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico approaches, a team of scientists led by Dr. Peter Roopnarine of the California Academy of Sciences has detected evidence that pollutants from the oil have entered the ecosystem's food chain. For the past two years, the team has been studying oysters (Crassostrea virginica) collected both before and after the Deepwater Horizon oil reached the coasts of Louisiana, Alabama, and Florida.
Following the recent announcement of the discovery of the earliest known Christian imagery in the exploration of a sealed first century Jerusalem tomb, controversy predictably erupted, with numerous members of the community of biblical scholars offering alternate interpretations of the iconography and disputing the tomb's claimed Christian connections.
A Queen's physicist and a PhD student have developed a groundbreaking device that controls the depth of a laser cut, laying groundwork to provide pinpoint accuracy during surgeries. This new laser control technology is valuable in all surgeries where cutting too deeply could lead to serious complications.
Montreal, April 19, 2011 — New research at Concordia University is bringing us one step closer to clean energy. It is possible to extend the length of time a battery-like enzyme can store energy from seconds to hours, a study published in the Journal of The American Chemical Society shows.
Clean drinking water and basic sanitation are human rights. Yet almost 780 million of the world's population still have no access to drinking water and some 2.6 billion people live without sanitary facilities. Water, though, is also an important economic factor: Today, agricultural and manufacturing businesses already use up more than four fifths of this precious commodity. And the demand for water continues to rise. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is expecting that by 2050, global water consumption will have risen by more than half.
Scientists are reporting development and successful testing of a way to reuse — hundreds of times — the expensive, dirt-busting enzymes that boost the cleaning power of laundry detergents and powdered bleaches that now disappear down the drain. The discovery, reported in the ACS journal Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research, opens the door to new laundry products, like special scrub brushes or reusable enzyme-coated plastic flakes and strips that might be added to cheaper detergents and then saved for reuse.
Comic book hero superpowers may be one step closer to reality after the latest technological feats made by researchers at UT Dallas. They have designed an imager chip that could turn mobile phones into devices that can see through walls, wood, plastics, paper and other objects.
The team's research linked two scientific advances. One involves tapping into an unused range in the electromagnetic spectrum. The other is a new microchip technology.